I’m certainly no Pratchett, so I can’t speak to that. I would say there’s an enormous round coin upon which sits an enormous giant holding a magnifying glass, looking through it down at her hand. When you get closer, you see the giant is made of smaller people gazing back up at the giant through telescopes. Get even closer and you see it’s people all the way down. The question of what supports the coin, I’ll leave to others.
We as humans, believing we know ourselves, inevitably compare everything around us to us. We draw a line and say that everything left of the line isn’t human and everything to the right is. We are natural categorizers, putting everything in buckets labeled left or right, no or yes, never realizing our lines are relative and arbitrary, and so are our categories. One person’s “it’s human-like,” is another’s “half-baked imitation,” and a third’s “stochastic parrot.” It’s like trying to see the eighth color. The visible spectrum could as easily be four colors or forty two.
We anthropomorphize because we’re people, and it’s people all the way down.
I have DID and am also curious how it would affect the measurement. I'm just waking up so I've only skimmed the paper so far, but I suspect the results would differ depending on which of us was fronting.
We've noticed that each of us integrates not just sensory information differently, but we also seem to be "wired" differently.
For instance, we are AuDHD, and I, the primary host, lean strongly to the autism behavioral side, my co-host is somewhere between, and a secondary host leans strongly to the ADHD behavioral side. Things that are easy for me can be hard for another.
We also experience senses very differently. There have been many times where one of us can smell something strongly, switch, and the other can't smell it at all.
This affects other senses as well. When I watch a 24 fps movie at a theater, for about the first 10 minutes, all I see is a strobing of still images before I finally adapt and see motion. My co-host sees continuous motion right from the start. This may relate to the temporal binding window discussed in the paper as a motivation for their research.
Our working hypothesis since we were finally diagnosed has been that identity is, at least in part, an integration of both sensory information as well as how strongly various brain regions are activated by whichever identity or identities are most active at a particular time.
Lastly, we have the ability to "take control" over just part of the body. For example, for whatever reason, the motion of stirring a sauce is difficult to me, but it's trivial for another, so sometimes they'll take control of our arms to stir the pot while cooking. To me it feels like my arms have disappeared and someone else's arms are now attached and stirring the pot. This may be temporal binding window related because we do seem to experience sensory information at different speeds and this might cause us to get that alien hand feeling, which is sort of opposite of the rubber hand illusion.
So, I suspect that each of us would react differently to the rubber hand illusion test.
This is why black swan events can be so devastating.
I saw another comment here about a month ago that said many people tend to round a very small risk down to zero risk. The comments were related to driving and the risk of serious injury or death that most people discount, but I think it also applies to other areas of risk in life, too, for many people.
Exceptional events are low probability by definition, and thus people tend to ignore the possibility, assuming instead that the status quo will continue to exist.
I'm also on the spectrum and like using various kinds of parallel construction, including antithesis.
I also tend to use a lot of em dashes. If I posted something I wrote in, say, 2010, I'd likely get a lot of comments about my writing absolutely, 100% being AI-written. I have posted old writing snippets in the past year and gotten this exact reaction.
I originally (two decades ago) started using em dashes, I think, because I also tend to go off on frequent tangents or want to add additional context, and at the beginning of the tangent, I'm not entirely sure how I'll phrase it. So, instead of figuring out the best punctuation at that moment (be that a parenthesis, a comma, or a semicolon for a list), I'll just type an em dash (easy on a Mac).
Then I don't go back and fix it afterward because I have too many thoughts and not enough time to express them. There are popular quotes about exactly this issue.
It's a kind of laziness in the form of my expression to give me more mental capacity to focus on the content. Alt 0151 and Alt 0150 are still burned into my memory from typing em dashes and en dashes so often on Windows.
I suppose I'll have to consider this my own punctuation mode collapse that RLHF is now forcing me to correct.
We as humans, believing we know ourselves, inevitably compare everything around us to us. We draw a line and say that everything left of the line isn’t human and everything to the right is. We are natural categorizers, putting everything in buckets labeled left or right, no or yes, never realizing our lines are relative and arbitrary, and so are our categories. One person’s “it’s human-like,” is another’s “half-baked imitation,” and a third’s “stochastic parrot.” It’s like trying to see the eighth color. The visible spectrum could as easily be four colors or forty two.
We anthropomorphize because we’re people, and it’s people all the way down.